Kitchen drawers are used to store various household items. Typically one kitchen drawer, located in an easily accessible location in the kitchen, is used to hold an assortment of items, such as cutlery, utensils, gadgets and other kitchen aids, which the homeowner tends to use more frequently than other items. However, such an assortment of dissimilar items results in a disorganized drawer which makes finding specific items somewhat frustrating. Furthermore, since the drawer is in frequent use, there is a tendency for it to collect dirt, crumbs and the like, which falls into the drawer from the counter. As can be appreciated once such kitchen debris makes its way into the drawer it comes into contact with the exposed assortment of items and contaminates them, which is undesirable.
Attempts have been made to organize cutlery in kitchen drawers with cutlery trays. Some examples of known cutlery trays can be found in U.S. Design Pat. Nos. D353,078, D527,229, D562641, and D569,196; and U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2008/0073241.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,290,661 to DeFino is a further example of a cutlery tray which attempts to deal with the issue of debris contaminating cutlery in the kitchen drawer by providing a roll-top closure. However, the roll-top closure of the DeFino cutlery tray is complicated and prone to breaking and jamming. Moreover, the roll-top mechanism increases the vertical height of the DeFino tray relative to conventional cutlery trays, which makes for an inefficient use of the available space in the most important kitchen drawer.
In view of the above, there is a continuing need for improvements in cutlery tray designs. What is desired is a cutlery tray which is simple and inexpensive to manufacture, and is capable of organizing typical items held in kitchen drawers, efficiently, taking advantage of the average 3¾ to 4 inch clearance height of typical kitchen drawers, and which protects items placed therein from contamination by common kitchen debris.